1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates to a dental bar and a method of designing a dental bar and, more particularly, to an overdenture bar design and a computer-aided process of designing an overdenture bar.
2. Description of the Related Art
An overdenture bar or dental bar can be an important part the implant-based dental restorations for partially dentate, edentulous or fully edentulous patients. Implant-based dental restorations can have many advantages over standard removable dental restorations since the dental implants can enable the patient to get firmer bites. An important step in the dental restoration process is the fabrication of the overdenture or dental bar. The overdenture bar is supported on the installed dental implants in the patient and also supports the denture. The denture can be removable or permanently attached (e.g., polymerized) to the overdenture bar. In this manner, the overdenture bar structurally supports the denture on the installed dental implants.
In the past, overdenture bars were manually designed by a dental technician. This process was a lengthy and labor intensive process. Today, there exist techniques for generating patient-specific or custom overdenture bars. The NobelProcera™ Implant Bar Overdenture system, for example, involves a computer-aided design (“CAD”) and/or a computer-aided manufacturing (“CAM”) process in which the individualized overdenture bars are custom made to fit implants previously installed in a patient. In such a system, a dentist can take an impression of a patient's mouth using conventional procedures. In this manner, the position and orientation of the existing dental implants in a patient's mouth can be recorded. A dental laboratory then fabricates a model of the patient's mouth from the impression and can fabricate devices to record the maxillo-mandibular relationship. The dentist can verify and record the maxillo-mandibular relationship using conventional procedures. The dental laboratory then fabricates a wax setup and sends it to the dentist for a trial fitting in the patient to ensure correct function, esthetics and phonetics. The model and wax setup can then be scanned in using a scanner (e.g., a NobelProcera Scanner). Using a CAD/CAM system (e.g., NobelProcera Software), the dental laboratory can design a wide variety of implant bars on many different implant systems. The CAD data of the overdenture bar can be sent to a manufacturing center, where via computer-aided manufacturing, the overdenture bar is created (e.g., through precision milling). The overdenture bar can then be shipped to the dental laboratory along with clinical screws, and if desired, additional attachments. The laboratory can finalize the restoration and position the restoration on the overdenture bar and send the restoration and the overdenture bar to the dentist for installation.
While such techniques have proven to be advantageous and useful, there is a general desire to continue to improve the design of such overdenture bars.